From acclaimed author Jonathan Miles (“ a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him"— LA Times) comes a blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island.
Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that’ s gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’ t exactly what his employers said they were— and, complicating things further, he discovers he’ s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies— and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.
A desert-island meditation on the contours of love and grief and solitude as well as jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience, a narrative tour de force, and the work of a truly singular imagination. With this fourth work of fiction, Jonathan Miles, “ a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer” (Dave Eggers) has truly come into his own.
